When I was younger, I never happened to “look in the right direction” on my own in order to start the process of becoming agentic and coherent. Here are some sentences I wish I had heard when I was a kid:
The world is made out of parts you can understand, in particular via math
By understanding the parts, you can also control them
Your mind is part of the world and sometimes it doesn’t work properly, but you can work on that too
Humanity’s future is not being properly managed and so you should do something about that
Plausibly just hearing this would have done it for me, but probably that’s too optimistic.
Given the somewhat continuous (if you squint) nature of self-awareness, there MUST be some people exactly on the margin where a very small push is sufficient to accelerate their movement along the past. But I suspect it’s pretty rare, and it’s optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your valuation of your prior innocence and experiences) to think you were in precisely the right mind-state that this could have made a huge difference.
When I was younger, I never happened to “look in the right direction” on my own in order to start the process of becoming agentic and coherent. Here are some sentences I wish I had heard when I was a kid:
The world is made out of parts you can understand, in particular via math
By understanding the parts, you can also control them
Your mind is part of the world and sometimes it doesn’t work properly, but you can work on that too
Humanity’s future is not being properly managed and so you should do something about that
Plausibly just hearing this would have done it for me, but probably that’s too optimistic.
Given the somewhat continuous (if you squint) nature of self-awareness, there MUST be some people exactly on the margin where a very small push is sufficient to accelerate their movement along the past. But I suspect it’s pretty rare, and it’s optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your valuation of your prior innocence and experiences) to think you were in precisely the right mind-state that this could have made a huge difference.